Cruz, Ted: Good morning. The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will come to order. Welcome to all the witnesses. Within our lifetimes, the Internet has impacted nearly every aspect of the world and our daily lives, especially how we communicate. It was only a short time ago that speech and newsworthiness was controlled by a handful of networks and giant newspaper publishers. If you held a position they didn't want to print or wasn't consistent with their political views, it didn't get said. The Internet changed that, allowing anyone to bypass these gatekeepers and shape public opinion with their own views. The Internet also created a new way to communicate anonymously and at greater scale through blogs, message boards, and comment sections. But with opportunity came legal questions. The law wasn't written for the Internet's ease and anonymity. Holding a platform liable for the illegal speech of another person threatened potentially to overwhelm early Internet companies with ruinous lawsuits that would predictably result in less online speech. So Washington explicitly adopted a light-touch regulatory approach with the enactment of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Congress included Section 230 to ensure that online platforms would not be liable for the illegal speech of another person. It did so to preserve a competitive free market, and the text of Section 230 explicitly recognized that the Internet provided a, quote, for a true diversity of political discourse. But 30 years later, it seems that big tech has now become the new gatekeeper, the new speech police. If you disagree with a particular view, big tech doesn't answer that with more speech. They do not try to persuade. They do not debate. They simply make the view they disagree with disappear. And they silence you. That should scare everyone. What's even more concerning is how the government hijacks big tech's powers to shape online discourse and to suppress dissenting views and undermine free speech. This isn't fiction. As I detailed in my report in hearings last year, the Biden administration weaponized the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to bully big tech to censor lawful speech on COVID and on elections, disproportionately muzzling conservative voices. We should recognize and celebrate how the free market can cause a course correction against big tech censorship. Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter was one of the most important steps for free speech in decades. It showed that the censorship regime is not inevitable, and it can be challenged in the marketplace and shifted to allow the kind of diverse viewpoints that Section 230 envisioned. Congress must also consider every constitutional tool we have to ensure and to prevent social media from harming Americans, especially children, while not incentivizing big tech censorship. The Take It Down Act, which I led together with Senator Klobuchar, demonstrates that Congress can pass targeted legislation to protect children and adults online. The law prohibits non-consensual intimate images, including such images created with artificial intelligence, and it creates a process to provide notice and takedown for victims, all without amending Section 230 or chilling lawful speech protected by the First Amendment. I've also introduced several other legislative reforms to actively support free speech online, including the TERMS Act, which stops online platforms from weaponizing their terms of service to silence Americans and deny them access to essential products and services. And I will soon be introducing the JAWBONE Act to stop government agencies from bullying platforms into silencing the American people. The same reasons why Congress enacted Section 230 to prevent liability for a different person's speech are still relevant, and I'm concerned that a full repeal or sunset would lead platforms to engage in worse behavior, to engage in more censorship, to protect themselves from litigation. I also don't believe, as some of my colleagues have suggested, that we should use Section 230 reform to silence more lawful speech or to turn the government into the arbiter of truth. But we should consider whether reform of Section 230 is needed to encourage and to protect more speech online and to stop big tech censorship. No government official, regardless of party, should have the power of censorship. I agree with John Stuart Mill that the best solution for bad ideas and for bad speech is better ideas and more speech. We don't need to use brute government force because the truth is much more powerful. I turn to ranking member shots.